William James on Catholicism

On another blog I see that the following question has been raised: "Do you know what William James thought of Catholicism?"

The blogger gives his own reply, which you can read via this link if you like.

Personally, I think I do have a handle on what James thought of Catholicism, so I'll offer my own answer.

The short answer is this: he thought of it as too “legalistic and moralistic” to satisfy the deepest of spiritual needs. But he did admire the aesthetic creativity with which it has always been associated, and he regretted the anti-aesthetic, stained-windows-smashing, aspects of the Reformation.
(See? as always with James, even the short answer can’t be very short, because there is always on the one hand and on the other hand. It is what makes him adorable.)

As for the theology of it, James had little patience for the sort of doctrinal structure that generally comes with the RC faith. Here is a pertinent passage from Varieties:

“Take God’s aseity, for example; or his necessariness; his immateriality; his ‘simplicity’ or superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest … candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? … what vital difference can it possibly make to any man’s religion whether they be true or false?”

He is aiming directly at the Thomistic doctrinal baggage of the Church there.

Dante and Anarchism

"...over thyself I mitre thee and crown."

That is the (Dorothy Sayers) translation of the moment in Dante's Divine Comedy when Virgil tells the pilgrim that he has become a fully self-responsible, self-aware individual. They have travelled through Hell and Purgatory together. Virgil, as a pagan, can go no further -- can never enter the third Realm -- so he will soon depart.

"Over thyself I mitre thee and crown." In Italian, "per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio." You have now within yourself the powers of both state and church.

Obviously, Dante is not taking an anarchistic (or an antinomian) position here. He is simply saying that once one's will has been purged of all the twistings that might lead it astray, it will not be led astray. The institutions of mitre and crown are supposed to contain those twistings during this life, purgatory will cure them in the next.

Still, it does not take much free-associating from that line to associate it with the hope that even in this life, human history will reach a point at which earthly sovereigns and hierarchs will no longer be, or even be thought to be, necessary.

At some point, each of us may seize his own mitre and crown.

Apocryphal doesn't mean "phony"

In terms of its origin, it just means "hidden." Of course, Protestants in their rebellion against what they saw as the Catholic distortion of Holy Scripture rejected the "Apocryphal" books, and in their polemical rejection they gave the term, with a small "a," the significance of "phony" or "unreliable."

I regret that. I have no interest in participating in post-Reformation apologetics, but it does seem to me that saying a story is "apocryphal" gives a phoney veneer of sophistication to saying, simply, "I don't believe it," or "this can't be trusted."

Just a thought for the day. Loosely inspired by: this.

Enjoy the remains of the Labor Day weekend. In the northeastern United States, it has been a wonderful stretch of days.

Tony Blair at Yale

The former prime minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, is now a Roman Catholic.

That's old news? Well, maybe. But here's something a bit newer: he's also now a lecturer on religion at Yale University.

It's a part time gig. He'll deliver five lectures a year for three years, in return for a nominal fee and a donation to his foundation.

In his honor, then, here's a quotation from The Varieties of Religious Experience, on the appeal of the Church of Rome.

"To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of 'child-like,' -- innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delivate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness."

Against riding tigers

It was one thousand and forty-four years ago this week that a council called by an Emperor deposed a Pope.

More specifically, it was on December 4 of 963 that a council called and controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto, deposed Pope John XII.

John's offense? were they arguing about Arianism or the payment of taxes on Church land or ... what?

Actually, the dispute between John XII and Otto was quite nakedly one about power. John had asked for Otto's help in protecting him from a more small-time despot, Berenger II of Italy, (a Lombard). But John soon realized that he was riding a tiger, that the Emperor's power both above and below the Alps threatened to eclipse his own.

John began a search for allies who might overthrow Otto. Otto heard about this and, unsurprisingly, took offense. Hence his call for a council.

Emperors and Popes would continue to battle for supremacy in western Europe for a long time to come, until the rise of national monarchies and Protestantism created multiple supremacies and rendered their old rivalry moot.

So this week, marking the anniversary of that deposition, let us give a smidgen, but only a smidgen, of sympathy to John XII and to tiger-riders everywhere. As a general rule, there are better ways to deal with the local trouble-maker than calling in the bigger bully from across the mountains.

New Encyclical

Pope Benedict has issued a new encyclical, formally known as "Spe Salvi."

Papal encyclicals are issued in Latin, of course, and their first two words serve also as their title. "Spe salvi" comes from a biblical verse in a letter of St. Paul, "In hope we were saved," or Spe salvi facti sumus.

The gist of the encyclical seems to be that we should work toward improving this world, the secular reality into which we were born, and not let our hopes for the next one distract us from that.

On the other hand, the assurance of a next world, His Holiness tells us, will provide us with some useful perspective in our work bettering this one.

Secular hopes are often quite distant -- a utopia it may take several generations to build. But, the encyclical tells us, "a kind of hope that has nothing to do with me in person is not a real hope."

Further, we need criteria for the evaluation of whatever work we're doing to create a better world here, and that criteria must ultimately be otherworldly in nature.

More here (in English) if you're curious: http://www.zenit.org/article-21161?l=english

Latin American Reformation

I see in an Associated Press package of news briefs that Roman Catholic bishops in Latin America are concerned that they no longer have an exclusive claim to the religious loyalties of that huge region.

In a 136 page plan, the bishops said that evangelical Protestants have made inroads, and blamed the rise of "individualism and a mentality of relativism in ethics and religion."

Irritating as (some) evangelical Protestants can be, I have to say that if the Reformation has at last arrived in Latin America the fact deserves at least a brief cheer.

Anything that breaks down the link between spirituality and hierarchy is a positive bit of news for humanity, for if you're in the habit of looking for instructions from the person above you in the organizational flow chart, the muscles of freedom will atrophy.

For Reading on the Plane

Before leaving the James Joyce Centre after the theatrical production I've described, I bought some trinkets at the gift shop. Among them was a volume of Joyce's "Occasional and Critical Writings," which I thought would be a fun read on the airplane ride home if I didn't like the movie.

I don't remember what the movie was, but it was one I had seen, which left me free to crack open the book. Thus, I learned two facts about Joyce that surprised me: the unsympathetic nature of his reaction to Oscar Wilde, and the unbridled enthusiasm he expressed for Ibsen. Had I been required to guess his responses to these two contemporaries, I would likely have posited them the other way around. Ibsen's drama was revolutionary in its own way, but it seems to me to be a revolution in a quite different direction from that which Joyce was effecting in the format of the novel. And for Wilde's aestheticism, I thought, Joyce would have had something kind to say.

The piece about Ibsen here is a review of his 1899 work, "When We Dead Awaken." You can read it here: http://www.classicreader.com/booktoc.php/sid.7/bookid.1958/

Joyce spoke glowingly of Ibsen's "large insight, artistic restraint, and sympathy. He sees ... steadily and whole, as from a great height, with perfect vision and an angelic dispassionateness, with the sight of one who may look on the sun with open eyes."

The Wilde essay says that its subject has "deceived himself by thinking he was the harbinger of the good news of neo-paganism to the suffering people" when he was really just re-packaging Catholicism.

Joyce also expressed some curiosity whether the "epileptic cast of his nervous system" might be some exculpation for the crime of sodomy -- no word in the essay doubts the criminal nature thereof.

As I say, new data. There is no such sin as gluttony as regards food for thought.

A Maltese Saint

Pope Benedict canonized four new saints this Sunday.

Among them, the first-ever Maltese saint, Father Giorgio Preca, who died in 1962.

My vague understanding of my childhood religion classes tells me that the Church thereby recognizes Preca as someone who didn't have to spend any time in Purgatory before his admission to Heaven -- one of those who got to take the express train.

It seems a bit surprising that the Church, which has a rather long roll of saints by now, should only now be recognizing one from Malta. Its an island rich in religious and specifically Catholic history and connotation. According to the Book of Acts, chapters 27-28, the first evangelist there was ... Paul.

The Knights Hospitalers (as they were originally known) adopted Malta as their fixed home in the early sixteenth century, and ran the place -- becoming known as the Knights of Malta -- until Bonaparte expelled them at the end of the eighteenth, on his Egyptian expedition.

Now the knights are gone, but two centuries later Malta has a saint. I wish there were some resounding lesson there.

I can't write this much about Malta without thinking of a Humphrey Bogart movie with the adjectival form of the name in its title. A Bogart movie had to have a maguffine, after all. But the Falcon turned out not to be what everyone thought it was. But it worked fine as a maguffin.

Converts to the Church of Rome

The religious precincts of the blogosphere are abuzz these days with the name of Francis J. Beckwith, a new and surprising convert to Roman Catholicism.

Surprising because Beckwith was, until his conversion, president of the Evangelical Theological Society, an association of Protestant theologians.

(I should say that I don't feel any personal stake in Beckwith's move. I grew up as an observant Catholic, but that was decades ago, and feels as if it might have been in another galaxy. I comment only as a curious observer.)

Beckwith has become a prominent figure in church-state issues in recent years, taking predictable positions for an ETS head, arguing in favor of the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools, for example.

Here's his blog, rightreason.ektopos.com

He has explained himself, and his new faith, there. Most of his account is absorbed in issues of timing and mechanics. Once a very visible Protestant philosopher makes such a decision, how should he best make the fact known publicly without doing damage to an institution, the ETS, for which he continues to have good will? That was his quandry. He didn't want to play into historical suspicions about "the Jesuitical secrecy of these papists," but he didn't want to make an open and dramatic break, either.

The issue of mechanics may well have been wrenching for him, but concerns me not at all. What I want to know is: what did the conversion feel like? Was it impelled by reason, or by a non-rational inner light, or something else?

I had to scroll down rather far in the piece before he addressed that at all.

"As you probably know," he says at last, "my work in philosophy, ethics, and theology has always been Catholic friendly, but I would have never predicted that I would return to the Church, for there seemed to me too many theological and ecclesiastical issues that appeared insurmountable. However, in January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible."

Justification. Ah, that's the crux. Roman 1:17. "The righteous shall live by faith." The idea, as Luther and others have expounded upon it, is that faith leads to good works, but that it is the faith, not the good works, that justifies one before the Lord, that makes righteous.

What was the Catholic view on justification? The scandals that enraged Luther (the implication especially that one could buy an "indulgence" and either free a deceased friend from Purgatory or limit one's own stay there) were genuinely outrageous and no one today defends that.

So Beckwith said that key to his own conversion was a look at the Patristic writings. It was a very intellectual/academic sort of conversion experience, I gather. Like Cardinal Newman.

There may be another, even higher-profile, conversion to the Church of Rome soon.
Tony Blair is said to have been waiting for the end of his tenure at Ten Downing Street before declaring himself a Catholic -- the faith of his wife, Cherie.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1801237.ece